The Internet provides tremendous amounts of information that is made available to the public via web sites of various organizations. A web site includes one or more web pages providing information from the sponsoring organization. For example, the United States Congress makes information on pending legislation and votes available to the public on its website. As is known in the art, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the authorized language used on the Internet for creating web pages. HTML includes ASCII text surrounded by HTML commands in angle brackets which can be interpreted by an Internet web browser.
While a tremendous amount of information is available to the public via the Internet, the information is generally organized and presented in a manner selected by the owner or sponsor of the website. However, a user of the website may need to manipulate data available from a website in a particular manner. For example, a user may want to reorganize the data so that it can be manipulated using standard SQL queries. However, current web browsers, such as MICROSOFT INTERNET EXPLORER or NETSCAPE NAVIGATOR do not provide the capability to mine web pages to extract the data contained therein so that the data can be manipulated in the particular manner desired by the user, thus freeing the user from the format provided by the web site.